We performed a comparison between IBM Cognos and SAS Visual Analytics based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two BI (Business Intelligence) Tools solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The most valuable features are Report Development (Functionality) and Information Distribution (Flexibility)."
"IBM Cognos offers tools so that you can design and develop your own test queries and reporting solutions."
"The product is a very good reporting tool and is very flexible. It allows for the users to get a scheduled report."
"The main difference that I like about Cognos compared to other solutions is its data splitting functionality. We have all our company data inside the Cognos environment and so we prefer to split the information Cognos itself. It's more efficient this way."
"Previously, we were doing static reporting. Management would request a report, and it would take staff a week or more to provide it. With Cognos, we have dynamic reporting, and it has reduced both reporting and decision making times significantly. With the solution's dashboard, the company's management team has updated records at their fingertips. This means that they can directly access the data they need to make decisions."
"We use IBM Cognos for enterprise analytics and reporting."
"A positive feature is Report Studio, where we create beautiful, complex reports."
"Comparing IBM Cognos to other applications, once a person is trained on it or they have developed a skill set to operate the application, it is best in its category."
"I believe that the possibilities for exploring data and formulating visual results are quite good because it allows the business analyst to have different perspectives on the data."
"Great for handling complex data models."
"What I really love about the software is that I have never struggled in implementing it for complex business requirements. It is good for highly sophisticated and specialized statistics in the areas that some people tend to call artificial intelligence. It is used for everything that involves visual presentation and analysis of highly sophisticated statistics for forecasting and other purposes."
"The alert generation feature also helps in sending out ad hoc messages to the business users if business thresholds have been crossed."
"The speed to display charts and react to users' choices is great."
"The product is stable, reliable, and scalable."
"The flexibility of the configuration is valuable to me."
"I use Visual Analytics for enterprise reporting."
"IBM Cognos's error messages seem to be a bit ambiguous. An error will be encountered and a message will be sent out very ambiguous and after investigating the error message it could be any number of issues. There was never a direct answer to the question or a direct answer to the error messages. Sometimes it would be a generic error message for 21 different solutions. It wasn't very specific, which required a lot of digging around and trial and error trying to fix the problem. The messaging in their error messaging is something needing improvement."
"There are many problems with the product's stability part, making it an area where improvements are required."
"It would be good if the solution had conditional formatting."
"One key area for improvement is the need to improve the self-service nature and functionality of the product in terms of visual analytics."
"I would like for the platform to become more standard. If we make a development on our report and our dashboard, it will not be used in another solution. That means there is no portability for the developers."
"There are some problems with how Cognos handles huge data sets and when connecting with multiple sources and searching the data."
"In terms of what could be improved, I would say, monitoring, monitoring, monitoring. Some improvements in monitoring would be helpful. I'd like to see more monitoring of specific reports and fields. The way the auditing is now is very limited, so I'd like to see more of that - of the monitoring."
"Need improvement towards Visualization."
"The installation process can be a bit complex."
"In Brazil, there are few documents, courses, and other resources for studying and implementing the tool."
"There are scalability issues. It depends on the data volume and number of end-users. VA requires a lot of hardware resources to move volumes of data."
"The visualization should be better in SAS Visual Analytics. It is easy to use but when compared to other solutions it is lacking and the support is not very good."
"It is not as mature as competitors such as Tableau and QlikView."
"Better connectivity with other data origins, better visualization, and the ability to create KPIs directly would all help."
"There is a need for coding when it comes to digital reporting which can be intimidating."
"The deployment isn't smooth. Deploying Visual Analytics on the cloud takes a lot of work, or you can use some providers that give you SAS as a service. For example, there is a provider called SaasNow. They host SAS Visual Analytics and the license. You can buy the license and deploy it there without the hassle of installation because deploying the software isn't easy."
IBM Cognos is ranked 7th in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 132 reviews while SAS Visual Analytics is ranked 7th in Data Visualization with 35 reviews. IBM Cognos is rated 8.0, while SAS Visual Analytics is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of IBM Cognos writes "Improved the quality of our KPIs, while reducing calls to the IT department". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SAS Visual Analytics writes "Single environment for multiple phases saves us time, and has good visualizations". IBM Cognos is most compared with Microsoft Power BI, Oracle OBIEE, Tableau, SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform and SAP Crystal Reports, whereas SAS Visual Analytics is most compared with Tableau, Microsoft Power BI, Databricks, Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio and Qlik Sense. See our IBM Cognos vs. SAS Visual Analytics report.
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